Fires Believed Set as Protest Against Genetic Engineering

By SAM HOWE VERHOVEK with CAROL KAESUK YOON

Published: May 23, 2001

SEATTLE, May 22 — One fire gutted a research laboratory at the University of Washington Center for Urban Horticulture here, while the other destroyed two buildings and several vehicles at a poplar tree nursery in the northwestern corner of Oregon. Both were reported shortly after 3 a.m. Monday.

Today, federal authorities were combing both sites for clues, acting on what they described as strong indications that both fires had been set by a loosely knit group of radical environmentalists adamantly opposed to research on the genetic modification of trees.

At the Seattle site, some research was conducted into modification that, as with altered foods, could potentially make trees more commerically productive. Researchers, for example, are studying a gene that could alter how often a tree grows branches. The more branches, the more wood that could be turned into pulp for paper. The fewer branches, the fewer knots on the trunk and the more valuable the wood.

Such genetic manipulation has raised concerns for some people for a variety of reasons, including the possibility of harm to the environment. Others are opposed on principle to what they see as unacceptable tampering with nature.

Managers of the 7,300-acre Oregon tree farm said they did not create or grow genetically engineered trees there, but a company that once owned the property was affiliated with a university-based group, the Poplar Molecular Genetics Cooperative.

At the Oregon site, Jefferson Poplar Farms in Clatskanie, the words "You cannot control what is wild" and "ELF" were spray-painted on the sides of one of the remaining buildings, an F.B.I. spokeswoman, Beth Anne Steele, said today.

The initials stand for Earth Liberation Front, a movement that has claimed responsibility for arson and vandalism against commercial properties in recent years, including a ski resort in Colorado, a lumber yard in southern Oregon, and housing sites on Long Island and elsewhere. Four teenagers were charged in the Long Island arsons earlier this year.

F.B.I. officials said that the timing of the fires and other factors made them almost certainly related.

A man who identified himself as a spokesman for the North American Earth Liberation Front media office, in Portland, Ore., said in a phone interview today that such acts were a justifiable response to the "genetic engineering of our forests" that he said corporations were carrying out.

"These companies are rolling the dice with the biodiversity of the natural environment," said the man, who gave his name as Leslie James Pickering.

He said members of the media office — including himself — "speak ideologically" in support of acts like the fires, but were not directly responsible for them.

Some professors at the horticulture center here in Seattle said they found a particularly unfortunate irony in the damage. Much of the center's research is geared toward protecting or restoring the environment, and the fire may have killed a good portion of one rare species.

At the center, Dr. Sarah Reichard, a conservation biologist, studies showy stickseed, a rare plant in the Cascade Mountains of Washington; only 300 individuals are left in the wild. Dr. Reichard said she feared that the fire might have killed the 100 individuals of the species that had been painstakingly raised in the laboratory after a year's work, using a technique known as tissue culture.

"That's one quarter of the world's population," she said. "They clearly did not do their homework."

At the center's laboratory, Prof. H. D. Bradshaw, a plant geneticist in whose office the fire began, expressed bafflement as to why his place of work was the focus of attacks, both now and in a separate incident in 1999.

At that time, a few days before the World Trade Organization protests here, a group calling itself the Washington Tree Improvement Association hacked down nearly 200 trees in a nearby nursery.

"I've personally never genetically engineered a tree," Dr. Bradshaw said today as he gazed at the rubble of the site, which destroyed his office and much of the laboratory.

Dr. Tom Hinckley, the center's director, said he lost more than 30 years of research files, as well as slides that meticulously document the regrowth of vegetation around Mount St. Helens in the years since it erupted in May 1980.

Dr. Bradshaw's research includes the study of genetically engineered poplars kept in a nearby greenhouse; none of those trees were damaged in the fire. He said that his own basic research was geared toward identifying the genes that affect plant growth and form, rather than the creation of a marketable product.

And some of the work done there has been supported by the Department of Energy as well as giant timber companies like Weyerhaeuser and Boise Cascade .

If the fires were the work of the ELF or a similar group, they are acts virtually no mainstream environmental group has countenanced.

Indeed, some have supported genetic research into trees, saying that the greater mass and other properties such work produces for commercial tree farms could actually help alleviate the commercial pressures to log in native and old-growth sites.